| Weekly Wrap-up: iPhone Location Tracking, Optimize Your Brand's Facebook Page, Facts Should Be Free and More... Big news from the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference this week. Data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden (who is also a ReadWriteWeb contributor) revealed that iPhones running iOS4 are keeping an ongoing record of your location in an unencrypted and unprotected file. Privacy concerns plus security concerns plus anything to do with Steve Jobs' company equals the most popular story of the week. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key trends that are shaping the Web - mobile, location, Internet of Things - plus highlights from our six channels. Read on for more.
Continue reading »
 
Army Develops Android Phone for Battlefield First, the U.S. Army's Captain Jonathan Springer developed the iPhone app, Tactical Nav, for battlefield mapping and artillery sighting. Now, Ft. Bragg has developed an integrated system for many of the same things based on the Android operating system. According to the Army's Web page on the project, the security of the system is paramount. "The device, known as a Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, is the first developed under an Army effort to devise an Android-based smartphone framework and suite of applications for tactical operations. The government-owned framework, known as Mobile /Handheld Computing Environment, or CE, ensures that regardless of who develops them, applications will be secure and interoperable with existing mission command systems so information flows seamlessly across all echelons of the force."
Continue reading »
Spot O' Tea With That? Flipboard Gets the Telegraph, Guardian & Royal Wedding If you like tea with your crumpets and understand that Yorkshire Pudding is neither a pudding, nor dessert, then you might find your knickers in a bunch from excitement with the latest announcement from Flipboard. The company announced today that three pillars of British life - The Telegraph, The Guardian and one Royal Wedding - are coming to the iPad app's digital pages.
Continue reading »
Facebook "Like" Button a Year Old It was a year ago today - April 22, 2010 - that Facebook unveiled the Like button, the catalyst it uses to drive its now ubiquitous open social graph. The Like button has been integrated on more than 2.5 million websites with 250 million people engaging Facebook externally. In a status update on (what else?) Facebook's own Facebook page, the company said that that 10,000 websites institute the Like button every day. As of 9:30 a.m. Pacific, the status update had received 66,905 likes and 8,739 comments, with a lot of it in the form of general gibberish or completely off-topic to the Like button's year anniversary.
Continue reading »
Associated Press to Distribute Nonprofit Content Yesterday, the Associated Press announced that it would augment its syndicated news offerings with content taken from non-profit organizations. According to the announcement: "Newspapers, for the first time, will be able to request that feeds of nonprofit materials be delivered directly into their content management systems through AP's Webfeeds software. The project will begin testing with nonprofit organizations in California and will use Internet delivery feeds that have been put in place at newspapers over the past year."
Continue reading »
Google Reportedly In Talks With Music Service Spotify Google is in talks with European-based streaming music service Spotify, according to a report today on CNET. Google has been rumored to be working on launching a streaming music service of its own for years now, with clamor over the potential service reaching a peak last summer when Big G was said to have a service near ready for launch last fall. That rumor did not, however, come true. Spotify has had a similar past, but perhaps this sort of deal could get both companies what they really want - a piece of the musical pie in the U.S.
Continue reading »
Halfway to Windows 8, Windows 7 Has Sold 350 Million Licenses In the nature of Microsoft product updates, Window 7 is entering its middle years. Generally, Microsoft comes out with a new update to Windows every three years and Windows 7 is currently 18 months into its game. In that time Microsoft has sold 350 licenses to the operating system making it perhaps the fastest selling software of all time. In a blog post on the 18-month mark of Windows 7, Microsoft says that nearly 90% of businesses are currently in Windows 7 migrations and that it is saving enterprises $140 per PC per year, a $131 return on investment. The operating system has made it to desktops, laptops, netbooks and yes, tablets. The growth has been spurred by the cheeky advertising campaign - "Windows 7 was my idea!" - and the mass of money that Microsoft has spent marketing the product. Yet, Windows 8 rumors have begun to surface and it looks like it will make its debut in the fall of 2012, right on schedule with Microsoft's three-year product cycle. What can we expect?
Continue reading »
Google Rumored Preparing $10/Month Chrome OS Laptop Rentals As soon as this summer, Google could announce a program to rent Chrome OS portable computers for $10 to $20 per month. According to a report on the generally reputable tech blog Neowin, this plan, part of an effort to get more people using its services and viewing its ads online, was confirmed by an unnamed source. In response to our request for comment, Google told us the same thing it told the U.K. Register yesterday: "We don't have anything to share at this time." This, then, is just a rumor; but I think it's a very thought-provoking one. What would it mean for a consumer cloud computing interface to be available dirt cheap, largely ad-supported and as a rental?
Continue reading »
Parents Rejoice: New Technologies Will End "Sexting," Driving While Texting & More Mobile carriers in the U.S. will soon have expanded Family Locator solutions in place that offer far more controls than simply tracking family members' whereabouts. Instead, these services will offer tools that allow parents to stop teens from texting while driving, stop "sexting" from occurring and stop kids from communicating with unwanted parties. Parents will also be able to read the content of text messages, preview mobile photos before being posted publicly on the Internet or sent to friends and will be able to specify what types of applications can be downloaded to kids' phones and when those apps can be used.
Continue reading »
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment